Abraham Lincoln eBook

“I have been unable to escape
this toil. If I had foreseen it, I think
I would not have come East at all. The speech
at New York, being within my calculation before
I started, went off passably well and gave me
no trouble whatever. The difficulty was to make
nine others, before reading audiences who had
already seen all my ideas in print."[1]

An edition of Mr. Lincoln’s address was brought
into print in September, 1860, by the Young Men’s
Republican Union of New York, with notes by Charles
C. Nott (later Colonel, and after the war Judge of
the Court of Claims in Washington) and Cephas Brainerd.
The publication of this pamphlet shows that as early
as September, 1860, the historic importance and permanent
value of this speech were fairly realised by the national
leaders of the day. In the preface to the reprint,
the editors say:

“The address is characterised
by wisdom, truthfulness and learning ...From the
first line to the last—­from his premises
to his conclusion, the speaker travels with a
swift, unerring directness that no logician has
ever excelled. His argument is complete and is
presented without the affectation of learning,
and without the stiffness which usually accompanies
dates and details ...A single simple sentence
contains a chapter of history that has taken days of
labour to verify, and that must have cost the author
months of investigation to acquire. The reader
may take up this address as a political pamphlet,
but he will leave it as an historical treatise—­brief,
complete, perfect, sound, impartial truth—­which
will serve the time and the occasion that called
it forth, and which will be esteemed hereafter
no less for its unpretending modesty than for
its intrinsic worth."[2]

Horace White, who was himself present at the Chicago
Convention, writes (in 1909) as follows:

“To anybody looking
back at the Republican National Convention of
1860, it must be plain that
there were only two men who had any
chance of being nominated
for President.

“These were Lincoln and Seward.
I was present at the Convention as a spectator
and I knew this fact at the time, but it seemed to
me at the beginning that Seward’s chances
were the better. One third of the delegates
of Illinois preferred Seward and expected to vote for
him after a few complimentary ballots for Lincoln.
If there had been no Lincoln in the field, Seward
would certainly have been nominated and then the
course of history would have been very different from
what it was, for if Seward had been nominated and
elected there would have been no forcible opposition
to the withdrawal of such States as then desired
to secede. And as a consequence the Republican
party would have been rent in twain and disabled from
making effectual resistance to other demands of
the South.

“It was Seward’s conviction
that the policy of non-coercion would have quieted